


Tomorrow's Epitaph

by SherlockMalfoy



Series: The Scars on our Souls [1]
Category: Heroes (TV 2006)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Developing Relationship, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Multi, Murder, Non-graphic Murder, Post Series, Relationship(s), Triad relationship, War, but still if it is triggering then this is not the fic for you., hard angst, major trigger warning - murder of a pregnant person, minor character cameos, slightly AU references to "The Wall"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 07:56:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21334846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SherlockMalfoy/pseuds/SherlockMalfoy
Summary: The world changes after Claire takes her nose dive on live TV. Specials just wanted to live their lives in peace. Peter, Sylar, and Emma do just that against a backdrop of political and social unrest, staying out of trouble and keeping their abilities hidden. But one night in late June, trouble finds them soon enough.(MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING: i'm spoilering part of my own plot here but seriously, major character death. Cold blooded murder of a pregnant woman and her unborn children.DO NOT READ IF THIS TRIGGERS YOU!!!!)
Relationships: Emma Coolidge / Peter Petrelli / Sylar | Gabriel Gray, Peter Petrelli/Sylar | Gabriel Gray
Series: The Scars on our Souls [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1537978
Comments: 1
Kudos: 22





	Tomorrow's Epitaph

**Author's Note:**

> So, you've decided to read it. I'm assuming you've read the trigger warning in the tags, and the one in the summary. This is the **LAST WARNING** you are going to get.
> 
> **A pregnant woman will be stabbed to death. She will die. So will her babies.  
**  
No, I do not graphically detail her getting stabbed. I describe her husbands finding her, and yes there is blood.
> 
> Is this a cheap trope to motivate the male characters to action?_ Yes._ I'm not shying away from this, and you don't need to point it out to me.
> 
> If you turn back now, it's okay. The next part of this story/series will have a brief summary of this story in the notes at the beginning so you'll at least understand the major plot points.
> 
> _If you read beyond this point and you still get triggered and upset, then that is on you the reader and not me. I've done all I can to warn you._

It was a good life.

Mostly.

It was a strange one, that was certain.

But what more could they expect when they were the only things that were real in an empty world of make believe and utter silence?

Perhaps that’s why Peter didn’t shove him away after the man’s twenty-second attempt to touch him. It was an innocent touch, too. A hand on his arm, below the elbow. Nothing too intimate. Just a slight touch to get his attention when he’d spaced out in thought again. He still called him Sylar though. That would never change no matter how much he wanted Peter to call him Gabriel.

Somehow in the five years Peter was trapped there, they had made peace. The ghosts of Nathan were finally laid to rest and Peter had been able to forgive - he would never forget - but he could forgive. Because that’s just who Peter was. He could forgive his mother for her manipulations. His father for… well…  _ nearly _ everything. And Nathan for… everything. And Peter would, in time, forgive Sylar as well.

Between hammering at the wall, wandering the empty city, estimating when holidays might have been, and doing a lot of reading, they had somehow begun to depend on one another for comfort. Sometimes just spending time in silence, each man to his own chosen activity, in the same room helped ease the aching loneliness that they felt. So the occasional touch here and there for the touch starved was a small price to pay for simple companionship.

They had eased into intimacy without even realizing what was happening. And by the time the wall came crashing down, aside from when they would have the most spectacular fights and screaming matches - because they were who they were - bad history and all, they had been sleeping in the same bed. Bodies entwined in sleep as lovers often lay when dawn finds them after the long, cold night.

But then the wall came down and the real world came crashing back in. Reality and all its noise and burdens broke the easy bond they had forged between them. The Hero and the Monster, though reformed, was all they could be in this world of light and life and noise.

They saved the day. Peter got the girl, and Sylar… Sylar slipped away into the night before the police found him. And that was that.

Until Peter found himself searching. For what he didn’t know. But there was a yearning in his very soul that longed for what was missing. A void he had steadfastly ignored as he had gone about his life like nothing had ever happened. Hiding his abilities in plain sight. But he found himself visiting places that had been merged with the nightmare world. Eerily familiar as they had been places transplanted from Sylar’s memory - much like his apartment had been - into the world of silence and nothingness.

And when he found his monster hiding in the dark he did what he swore he would never do again. Because it felt so good. He felt… whole. The void that had plagued him since those long five years was suddenly filled and he felt alive again for the first time in months.

When it happened again, and again, he felt guilty each time. Because Emma was waiting for him. Emma should have been enough. She was soft curves and easy smiles and blond curls… but sometimes he needed hard and fast and pain. He needed to be reminded of what he’d given up. What he’d sacrificed in order to save the world time and again.

He got careless. Reckless. Had wanted a real bed for a change.

Emma had caught them.

Thankfully they weren’t in the middle of it. She hadn’t seen him have the best damn orgasm of his life while riding Sylar’s cock and being choked out with the man’s telekinesis. Or having his nipples shocked repeatedly when he didn’t do exactly what Sylar had told him to do in bed. She hadn’t witnessed his absolute depravity that he had been far too ashamed to talk about with her before. No, she saw them naked and entwined, content and happy as they held one another in Peter’s bed. The same bed she and Peter would sometimes have sex in. Sometimes lay in and hold one another as Sylar was holding him then.

She broke up with him.

He got ridiculously drunk and ended up going to work hungover.

He nearly lost his job.

He broke it off with Sylar again after one hell of a fight that left Peter more broken than he’d started, even if he did copy cellular regeneration so he could heal for work the next day.

Sylar sought out Emma. He had no choice. Peter was self destructing and he needed Peter not to be doing that. Yes it was selfish of him, but his sanity and his redemption both depended on Peter. Without him, Sylar was nothing but a mindless beast and he knew this as sure as the sun rose in the east and set in the west.

It took a long time before he could talk her into visiting Peter and talking. Just talking. It took many a talk on many an evening before they had something worked out. Emma wasn’t exactly happy about it, and neither was Sylar. But for Peter’s sake, they were determined to make it work.

So one year after Claire jumped off the ferris wheel, Peter Petrelli was sitting in a casual dining restaurant with Emma on his right and a disguised Sylar to his left, discussing which one of them was taking Peter out on a date when like it were the most normal conversation to be having in an Olive Garden on a Tuesday night. And Peter, for his part, was still in shock that he didn’t have to choose between them after all. Somehow, the arrangement could work. Because he had Sylar and that made him feel like an entire person for the first time in a year. And he had Emma, whom he loved beyond rational reason. For fuck’s sake he went and rescued a serial killer that had been terrorizing various parts of his family for over a year because she was in danger and he loved her that damn much to do the most crazy thing he could think of.

Peter was quite surprised when Emma had suggested that all three of them pile up in her bed at her apartment - since it was bigger - just to sleep. Just to see if it could even be workable for them.

Peter wasn’t exactly surprised when he came home one night after the first four months to find Sylar and Emma in the bed at his apartment, going at it like rabbits. He was rather surprised to find she was quite forceful in bed with the man. Entirely unlike she was with Peter.

When he pointed this out to her later, she was quite embarrassed that they had been caught. Sylar was just smug and asked what was for dinner. It wasn’t a full week later when all three of them were, once again, piled up in the bed at Emma’s place. Naked and writhing together in the dimly lit bedroom, Peter sandwiched in the middle sometimes. Emma other times. Never Sylar though. And that was fine. That’s what worked for them.

In the two years since Claire’s jump, with the backdrop of the Specials being reclassified a Evos by international governments, the US lead the charge in proposing and implementing the Evo Registration Acts. For a time the triad were relatively unaffected by politics and public perceptions of their kind if only because they kept their abilities hidden. It wasn’t that hard a thing to do, after all, when one could be an entirely different person. Another only copied someone else’s homework. And the third - though seen as utter perfection by the men who loved her - was relatively overlooked because of her disability. No one really thought “people like her” could be “one of Them”.

Sylar lived under an assumed identity which required shapeshifting any time he went out the front door of Peter’s or Emma’s apartments. He did odd jobs that paid cash under the table, but it was mostly to keep busy and to have something to do when Emma and Peter were at work. He could turn anything into gold and sell the gold on for plenty of cash.

Claire, Peter had learned, had changed her name to Petrelli. She claimed it was to honor her dead father, but Peter suspected it was the power behind the name she sought to use. She was the face of Evo kind on talk shows and newscasts for a few years now. But Peter, Emma, and Sylar all agreed it was best to keep their abilities under wraps. Peter lost count of how many of their own kind he treated in the ambulance. All because they were different. All because they were extraordinary. He lost track of how many turned up dead in the news. How many children were abandoned by their parents because of a quirk of genetics at conception.

The last time he and Claire had spoken the government had just pushed the Registration Act through congress. Right now it was voluntary. But they all knew it was only a matter of time before it became mandatory. Before they would be forced to self-identify or worse, be made to carry some form of visible marker; be it on clothes… or skin. He and Claire had argued that day as Angela had called the family - what was left of it - together to inform them of the ultimatum she had been given. Gut the Company and hand over all its assets to the new governmental department assigned to deal with the Evo population, or she and everyone under her would face prosecution for all of the crimes they had committed for the last half a century. That included Peter, Claire, and Noah Bennet.

Peter had turned on Claire, congratulating her for accomplishing what Nathan had continuously failed to do - often because of Peter’s intervention.

“Yeah, and what’s that?”

“I don’t need to see the future to know when you jumped, you single handedly killed us all. How does it feel? I imagine you finally made at least one of your daddies proud.”

Claire had slapped him hard across the face. The last thing Peter heard from his mother for quite a while to come were her angry words as Peter and Sylar, as his alter ego, had left.

“For once, I agree with him. God help us, Claire. I actually agree with him.’’

Though they couldn’t both marry Emma, it didn’t stop them from both proposing to her.

It was decided between the three of them that Peter would be the husband and Sylar their very special friend who happens to live with them once the three got a new apartment to accommodate. Sure it was in Long Island and not Manhattan, but between the three of them they could afford it. Three bedrooms, one of which they’d decided to turn into a home office for whatever they’d like to do, and two baths. The wedding in spring wasn’t anything too formal. Peter and Emma got married with Sylar, Hesam, and Emma’s mother as witnesses.

For appearances sake, Sylar had his own bedroom but really it was kept as a guest room since the three had long since started sharing a single bed.

Having Peter be the public husband was helpful, though. When he didn’t want to go to some function with Emma - be he sick or working on a very important project - Sylar would shapeshift into him and no one was the wiser. The three even had matching wedding bands. Emma was just as much Sylar’s wife as she was Peter’s. And Peter was just as much Sylar’s husband as he was Emma’s.

And the three of them loved one another.

And it was enough.

In late 2012, Emma presented a small box to her husbands as a belated Christmas present.

They didn’t understand why such a small gift was given to them both until Sylar lifted the lid and Peter exclaimed loudly when he saw the used stick inside, “You’re pregnant!?”

Only for Sylar to sign it because Peter’s mouth when he gets too excited sometimes is hard for her to lip read. She smiles. She nods. And they shower her with love and affection. And that night, when Peter’s come back from his shift, both of her men worship her for hours.

She’s showing.

The most recent ultrasound showed two heartbeats.

It was Sylar’s turn to go (looking like Peter of course) with her for the check-up.

The home office is soon dismantled and Peter and Sylar argue over what furniture to get for the nursery. What color they should paint the room even though they don’t know if it’s boys, girls, or maybe even one of each. Emma watches and she laughs and she just hopes that their children are happy and healthy.

Names start flying around. Boys. Girls. Both. Neither. Who gets the final say (Emma) on what names to use.

It’s decided that if they’re Peter’s then Sylar gets to name them. If they’re Sylar’s then Peter gets to name them.

“It’s only fair,” Emma frequently has to remind them. “That way all three of us are part of them.”

The Registration Act goes from voluntary to “voluntary” in March of 2013. Employers start finding ways to root out Evos and fire them even though the registration act supposedly has protections built in to prevent this.

Claire Petrelli, the most well known and outspoken Evo advocate in the public eye is attacked when she speaks up about the changes and amendments to the Registration Act and how it’s negatively affected people like her.

No one knows if it was an Evo or not that attempted it. Sylar says he’s heard grumblings in the streets. In the quiet places where people like them hide away. They blame Claire for all of it. It’s only a matter of time until someone else tries again.

Emma decides to start her maternity leave early in mid April when the hospital’s HR department starts giving certain employees the side-eye.

Thankfully, the ambulance service Peter works for is run by an Evo. His job is safe so long as he stays under the radar. So long as he can still technically avoid having to register himself and his abilities.

Sylar’s just glad he has cellular regeneration so he doesn’t even have to go to the doctor.

The Good Doctors Suresh cured him of ever wanting to see another one again.

The Nursery is finished in May.

Peter and Sylar, with Emma’s executive decision making, settled on neutral colors and dark woods.

It’s early June and people start putting the dots together. Petrelli isn’t exactly a common name after all. Though there’s no proof that they are, there also isn’t proof that they aren’t. Sylar, always paranoid and always one to pay attention to their surroundings is the first to notice that not all of their neighbors regard them in the same live and let live light they once had. Sure, Mr. and Mrs. Knightley in number 207 are still polite. They still smile and greet the Petrellis and their “special friend” of number 302 as if nothing has changed. But sometimes Sylar feels a little tickle… a slight tingle in the back of his head that they and others in the building aren’t quite so truthful and honest as they once were.

In late June, Emma begs off date night. She’s seven and a half months along and the twins have made her so very tired. Her men decide they’ll just stay home with her then, but she insists they go have a nice night out anyway. She jokes that they could use some Emma-free time. Impending baby-free time.

And while they don’t want to leave her home alone, Peter has to admit that she’s right. He’s been feeling that itch to get rough. The itch only Sylar can scratch and the gaping void in his soul only he can fill. And as for Sylar… the Hunger’s been riding him hard since he first twigged the change in the neighbors. They can’t argue about it - they need it. Need each other.

So they go.

They have a good time. See a movie. Have a nice dinner. Tease each other and toy with each other and they definitely have a plan for the guest room when they get back home so as not to bother Emma too much.

But when they get home, all thoughts of their much needed and some-what violent release is forgotten when Peter sees the broken locks. Peter swaps powers out, grabbing regeneration just in case as he and Sylar rush inside their dark, silent apartment.

No…. Not silent. Not quite.

Sylar senses no one, finds no one as Peter seeks out Emma, following her too quiet sobs deeper into the apartment.

He’s already on the phone to the police - now isn’t that a trip - when he finds Peter kneeling on the floor of the kitchen, his hands covered in blood as he works to keep their wife and children alive until help arrives.

Peter rides with her in the ambulance - the distraught husband and father to be. And Sylar is angry. He wants to systematically go through the building and find anyone who might know something and punish them. He wants to slice their heads open and take a look. Find out who said anything. Find out who did this. He hasn’t felt this anger in years. Not since he had been walled in. Walled in alone and then walled in with Peter. Not since he had saved Emma from the vile puppeteer Doyle so that Peter could save the world again. It was an old, selfish anger that gave way to rage as he quickly packed an overnight bag to take to Peter at the hospital. He knew the man wouldn’t want to stay in clothes stained by the blood of their wife and children.

It was June 28th, in the wee hours before dawn, that Emma Petrelli nee Coolidge was pronounced dead and the children she had been carrying… Well… many of the stab wounds had been to her very pregnant looking midsection.

Peter had collapsed in grief and Sylar, disguised as he always was in public, was silent and still contemplating murder seriously for the first time since 2008. He held Peter as he cried. As he broke down in the consultation room. And Sylar would, too, when this was over. But right now one of them had to be the strong one.

For the first time since he had killed Brian Davis, he was genuinely thankful for his original ability. It allowed him to remain somewhat… detached while Peter fell to pieces. Allowed him to look at the situation with a cold, logical eye… Even if the addition of Lydia’s empathy made it difficult to do so.

It was this that had made it possible for him to calm Peter back down easily. Had helped him reign the emotional wreck back in. And once Peter had cried himself out and angrily beaten against Sylar’s chest and railed about the unfairness of it all and how good and pure and perfect Emma was and how this should never have happened to her - to all three of them - he was finally able to think again. One of the first things he did was demand a DNA test for the children to be run against his own DNA. He didn’t feel the need to explain, and Sylar was grateful that Peter didn’t feel the need to suggest it be run against his own.

The results, when they came two days later, after which Emma’s body was lined up for autopsy, the two grieving men learned one child was Peter’s. The other some other guy’s. And all of them… had the Evo marker.

Peter refused to register on the basis that his family carried the marker but he never got the powers. It skipped over him. The hospital didn’t care. But a nurse did. She glanced to Sylar at his side, gave them a wink, and laid her hand over the keyboard of her computer with a polite smile.

Peter and Emma’s names never appeared on the registry after that horrifying night.

The nurse was a technopath.

Peter never called his mother. Neither did Sylar. Hell, they hadn’t seen her since the night she called the family together to tell them she had to gut what remained of The Company or spend the rest of her days behind bars.

Despite Claire’s infamy, the name Petrelli still got things done in New York City. It still held some clout.

And so she pulled strings. She moved mountains and she did whatever she had to do for whomever she had to. When Emma’s mother was told of the tragedy soon after, she offered to help with arrangements or with… anything really. They were a family - even if she hadn’t entirely approved of Emma’s odd choice in relationship. Her daughter had been happy, loved, and the men in her life ensured she wanted for nothing and that’s what had mattered most to her.

Emma and the twins were laid to rest next to Nathan in the family plot. The children, a boy and a girl whom Peter and Sylar had named Virginia and Nathaniel, had been cremated and interred with their mother. Peter… changed. How could he not when it had felt like part of himself had been ripped so cruelly away? Even Sylar had a hard time reaching him and the man had torn Peter’s family apart more than once. But this time it was different. This time, perhaps for the first time in his life since he accidentally killed his mother, Sylar felt the pain of loss. He lied to himself often, telling himself he was just feeding off of Peter’s emotions. After all, every touch since Emma’s death had been flooded with anger and sorrow and it was such that Sylar seriously regretted learning Lydia’s ability before her death.

But he lied to himself because that was all he could do to deal with the heartbreak he and Peter shared.

As soon as the investigation was over, not that it went anywhere once word got out that Emma and the babies had all three been suspected Evos, the two men packed up their lives and hired someone to come in and repaint the place. Fix the doors. The works. The nursery was quietly dismantled and everything that had been in it anonymously donated to a women’s shelter. Peter had said it would have been what Emma had wanted. Sylar didn’t argue even though his fragile, re-established humanity agonized over parting with even a single piece of the life they could have had.

They rented a storage unit for the bulk of their things, and Emma’s, and were going to get a cheap apartment until Angela insisted that they move in with her.

Peter had tried to protest, giving her excuse after excuse until finally she’d simply told him that if she could pretend that the man Peter would be bringing into her home wasn’t Sylar, then the least he could do was let his mother make amends in his time of grief. After all, she was no stranger to heartbreak.

In August, Angela had called “Griffin” into her study after Peter had gone to bed. She tossed a file into his lap as she passed him to sit behind her desk. “We are at war and have been since the day my idiot granddaughter exposed us to the world.”

“And what am I meant to do with this?” Though Sylar did pick up the file and looked through it. His pulse quickened as he easily recognized the information. The photographs. The damage done to their old apartment. And then he saw it. A phrase that was going to become very familiar to him over the next couple of years.  _ Unregistered Mutation(s), No Further Investigation Sanctioned _ .

“The Company may be gone, but this family is not. And as long as I still breathe I will do everything in my power to protect it. The question now is will you?”

“I don’t do that anymore, Angela. I’ve changed.”

“I know, Gabriel,” she said, and he was surprised to find that she told the truth. “But I have no other option. We are all going to die. Of that I have no doubt. It is only a matter of time.”

“Then why fight it?” he asked, accusation in his voice as he closed the file and threw it at her. She flinched in the face of his anger, but that’s all she did. “It’s inevitable so why should we even bother?!”

“Because there are those like Peter, like Claire who will not go down without a fight. I am old, and I am tired. So tired. And neither of them have the stomach to make the hard decisions. To make the sacrifices necessary to keep us safe and alive for as long as possible. They will come for people like me, first. Just as Arthur had.”

Sylar stood, a hand raking through his hair in a behavior that resembled more of Peter than it ever had Sylar or Gabriel or whatever name and face he chose to hide behind. And she hated it. Hated that the man who had taken so damn much from her was now the only hope she had. “You want me to turn my back on all of the good, all of the progress I’ve made because-”

“When was the last time either of you heard from Hiro Nakamura?” she said, suddenly changing the course of the conversation. “Matt Parkman could draw the future as well as get into someone’s head. Any word from your friends in the circus?” she asked. One by one a file was dropped on the desk. A name and a file. “They learned from Nathan’s mistakes and adapted. Your wife’s murder was calculated. It was premeditated, and it was staged to look like a simple home invasion gone wrong. Or perhaps a hate crime against Evos.”

He wished she were lying. He wished he felt the tingle that told him she was speaking half-truths. But no. Sylar leaned against the mantle, staring at a photo of Peter, Emma, and himself in his disguise. The three of them sitting happily together after the baby shower Emma’s mother had thrown for her. Emma in the middle with the both of them on either side, a hand each on her bump and all three smiling from ear to ear at each other. Sylar hadn’t even been aware someone had taken a picture. None of them had noticed.

He shut his eyes tight and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “Why was our wife killed, Angela?”

“Population control.”

The glass in the frame cracked as other items were thrown telekinetically from the mantle as if hit with a shockwave. Angela gathered the first file back together and stood from her chair. She left it, and the others, neatly on the desk before crossing the room to the door. She stopped at the last moment, turning to take in the state of the room, of the man she still hated with every fibre of her being. “I would never willingly ask this of you if I thought Peter or Claire were strong enough to take my place when they come for me. I am genuinely sorry, Gabriel.”

He wanted her to lie to him. So he could keep lying to himself. So he could pretend the Hunger hadn’t been raging inside since Emma’s death. Since Peter’s breakdown in the hospital. Since the man he loved had become a pale, drunken shadow of who he used to be. “Once you are gone, what do I do? Who do I contact? How do I keep whatever it is you’re doing going?”

She stood with her perfectly manicured hand on the white door frame. “I do not know, Gabriel,” she started. “But in my dream you, Peter, and Claire are the last ones standing when the end comes. I have to believe, to hope, that the three of you take out as many of the bastards as you can along the way.”

Peter isn’t stupid. He isn’t as blind as people think. The first few times, he doesn’t say anything. He pretends not to notice. He pretends he’s just as shocked as everyone else when reports hit the news of a new serial killer popping up not just in the US, but internationally. Peter pretends he doesn’t notice each time that his mother has taken a business trip, as part of her efforts to help Evos go underground all while pretending to be a charitable face for peaceful co-existence.

After all, The Company was disbanded, but she was still on the board for the Deveaux Foundation and of course in the absence of Hiro Nakamura, CEO of Yamagato Industries, Angela had stepped up as a member of that board as well to take charge of the humanitarian efforts while Kimiko and her husband focused on the business aspect.

Being such a high-profile businesswoman as well as the matriarch of a family that has produced at least one, possibly more Evos, it makes sense for her to have a bodyguard at all times.

And if Peter is silent as he holds Sylar tighter each time he comes home, stroking his sweat soaked hair as he suffers through more nightmares than he can handle… Then he does his best to make himself appear as ignorant as possible.

Until the night he’s woken from a deep sleep by crashing noises downstairs. A night when he knew both Angela and Sylar were still at home and not gone on one of their… trips. Finding himself alone in bed, he gets up and pulls on some clothes all the while cursing that the last ability he’d copied was the erotic empathic touch. Absolutely useless for fighting off intruders. It’s his worst nightmare come to life as he grabs the first thing he can think of - a wooden bat from his childhood room as he passes by it on the way to the stairs. Flashbacks of finding Emma on the floor, bleeding out and gasping for breath as she cried, barely able to speak and begging Peter to save the children as he tries his best to do exactly that and her as well.

His heart beating wildly as he swallows back his fear and his anger and his weakness, trying to push the reminder of his - of their - dead wife aside and man the fuck up. He gives a shout as he bursts through a door, and immediately drops the bat when he finds his nephew Simon curled up in the corner of a leather couch with his brother clinging to him. Sylar trying, and failing to stay conscious.

“Peter…”

And Peter runs to him, catching him as he starts to fall. There’s bullets in his back and a dart of some kind. Quickly Peter copies an ability, settling for the ever destructive lightning.

After checking for a pulse, and finding one - faint but still there, Peter hauls him to the sofa, ordering his nephews to get up and move out of the way. Simon refuses to move - he’s still in shock. But his brother pulls away and tugs on his older brother’s arm to clear the sofa just before Peter puts Sylar on his stomach. He yanks the dart out before ripping the shirt away.

“He’s not… He’s not healing…”

Panic tries to set in. He can’t lose him, too. He won’t. He refuses.

“What happened!” he roars, laying a hand on Sylar’s back and choosing another ability. Telekinesis. It’s messy, but it’s better than nothing and he doesn’t think he has time to get his medical kit from upstairs. And one by one he starts pulling the bullets from the holes with disgusting squelching noises. Blood bubbles up and pools and all he can see is Emma under his hands. And then he finally - FINALLY gets the right bullet. The right spot and there’s a choking gasp. The skin starts to knit back together.

Simon screams in horror as Sylar starts to move again. And Peter’s a mess. His eyes red. His face streaked with blood and tears and snot and the rest of the bullets push themselves out of Sylar’s flesh.

It’s two days before Sylar will speak about that night. And it’s only because Monty had run to him, clinging to him and refusing to let go.

Heidi had called Angela during the night. Monty had been having a nightmare and woke up screaming and floating three feet above his bed. When Heidi had come running to check on him… well… She didn’t know what to do. At least that’s what Angela had told Sylar when she’d gone to wake him to accompany her to Hyde Park. Because that’s what she had been fed by Heidi even though she didn’t believe a word of it.

There had been people waiting. It was an ambush and the children who were indeed their father’s sons, were the bait. And something in Sylar that night that wasn’t him but the shadow of a man he’d once believed he was had risen up to the surface and fought like a man possessed. And he was, in a sense, possessed. Because it certainly wasn’t Sylar or Gabriel Gray that had snapped when Angela Petrelli was shot through the head by a sniper watching through the window. It was an angry, vengeful son and an overprotective father that had laid dormant and silent for years after his death. It was the last ghost of Nathan Petrelli that forced his way to the surface and used Sylar and his vast arsenal of abilities as the vessel of his anger. Heidi lived - because Nathan had once upon a time loved the woman, but the boys came with him when he took off into the sky. Shot full of holes and one failed tranquilizer dart, he’d dragged the teenage boys to the backyard and flew despite the pain. Despite the slow death as the bullet that had hit too close to his kill spot had dug deeper and further with his every movement.

It was after this that Peter stopped pretending his husband hadn’t become a killer again. That he hadn’t been hunting - with his own mother’s help - those who killed Evos in some sick belief that they were saving the world. The worst part of it was, as Peter and Sylar packed bags and made ready to leave New York once and for all with Simon and Monty, the part of him that would have cared about the lives of Sylar’s victims simply… didn’t exist anymore. Maybe he was desensitized to it. Maybe he lost his faith in humanity. Or maybe, he really had become the man who once traveled back in time to kill his own brother if only it would save the future.

They left under the cover of darkness before the manor was raided. The only thing left to guide them was an old journal Angela had given to Sylar, instructing him never to open it until after she was gone.

They fled to Nevada. There was an abandoned government facility in the desert that Adam Monroe had acquired sometime before the Company had locked him away. It was meant to be a fallout shelter for the elite. For those chosen by Adam and The Twelve to survive should Angela’s dreams of the apocalypse come true. They found inside stockpiles of weapons. Medical supplies. And a plan.

Peter and Sylar began a search and rescue operation. The source that had been supplying Angela with information continued to do so for Sylar, and it quickly became apparent that the source was a familiar one.

One who had holed up in a bunker of his own in Mexico with his cousin and a few others following Claire’s jump at the Carnival.

It was a year after they had settled into the bunker in Nevada that Noah Bennet showed up with a semi hauling a shipping container full of Evos, having been directed to do so by Rebel.

Claire, it turned out, was with him and packing quite a nice rifle that put a few shots into Sylar out of reflex before Peter stepped in to take control of the situation.

The United States became the epicenter for the Genetics War. Hotspots across the globe of course popped up. The middle east… Well. Nobody went there unless they had a death wish. Which meant Peter was a frequent flyer, with Sylar hot on his heels to make sure the idiot didn’t actually get himself killed.

An all Evo militia popped up in Russia, raiding towns and villages. Pillaging. Burning. Saving only those like themselves.

New York became an irradiated wasteland.

And then entire bases were taken out by bomb strikes. No one could figure out how or why even the most secure bases were being hit. Until Simon Petrelli, assigned to a unit under his half-sister Claire called The Undying, reported back that his squad had found a UN Outpost in the arctic.

After the wholesale slaughter of the human guards by the Undying, they found what Simon could only describe as a torture chamber. Men and women, even children, surgically altered and attached to machines that… He wasn’t exactly sure what the entire purpose could have been, but he recognized GPS when he saw it. Data downloaded and sent back to the Nevada base had uncovered the entire network was one big GPS machine powered by clairvoyants and technopaths who had been… experimented on. Their abilities forced into constant activity, many of them brain dead but their bodies still alive, still processing for the machine that was mockingly called in the files The Walker System, after the first victim of the humans’ experimentation with reverse engineering, Molly Walker.

“No survivors, sirs,” Simon had said when he gave his official report. “It was impossible to remove victims from the network alive. Captain Petrelli ordered the immediate destruction of the device and the network before bringing the entire complex down and moving on.”

Sylar had silently opened the door of the war room as Peter had turned his back on his nephew to hide his face and regain control of the boiling rage that was building inside with every word out of Simon’s mouth. “Thank you, Simon. Dismissed,” Peter said.

Once they were alone, Peter turned his attention to Sylar. There was a deadness in him that had settled in as the war ground on. A deadness that had been kept at bay, barely, for so long. But when they lost Emma it was like a piece of them both had died and the darkness that Peter had chased away in Sylar during those five years alone together had found a new home in the once passionate and vibrant man in front of him. But age and battle had worn away at his heart.

“We can’t win this,” Peter finally said.

“No. We can’t.”

“We’re destroying the world with this hopeless war.”

Sylar nodded, moving to sit on the corner of the table, one leg hanging off either side of the corner. He drew in a deep breath, and let it out again in a sigh. “Mohinder’s last communication from Singapore indicated the humans have developed what they call a cure. Given the fact they’ve captured specials and experimented on them, turning them into machines for the war…”

“You think they might have rounded up a bunch of people like the Hatian?”

“I think they rounded up a bunch of people like Shanti Suresh and Maya Herera,” Sylar said. “People with abilities that poison those around them. And those who carry the antibodies against them.”

Peter stared at him for a long moment as he realized what this meant on so many different levels. “The Company was researching the Shanti virus in self defense… Deliberately infecting different ones of us to develop vaccines against it in order to prevent this exact kind of thing.”

“My immunity to the one version may give me some protection against new strains. Even when I was infected initially, I was able to resist Maya’s ability to a greater degree than most with the exception of her brother. Since we lost communication with Mohinder we have lost the only one we know of who’s blood carries natural antibodies that could be used to even begin to develop a vaccine.”

The humans resorted to biological warfare when it was obvious they couldn’t win in direct combat against Caire Petrelli’s elite, immortal fighting forces.

Mohinder Suresh managed to get one message out after his capture in Singapore. It came in the form of a vial of his own infected blood and instructions of what to do with it.

The humans began distribution of The Cure in third world countries, declaring it to be inoculations against various diseases. Those who had the genetic marker for an evolved ability, whether the ability manifested or not, fell ill. They did not lose their abilities immediately. Stage One mimicked the common cold or the flu. It would take one to two weeks before the victim would recover from this minor sickness. Enough time for The Cure to work through their bloodstream and mature. Enough time for it to replicate and, while the immune system was initially compromised, work its way into the tissue of the organs.

Stage Two was the loss of abilities, rendering the victim powerless.

Thanks to the vial of blood from Mohinder Suresh before his death, scientists for the Evos were able to create… not a cure, but medication that could slow the progression of the disease. Provided it wasn’t the more aggressive and faster acting strain. Provided the medication was given to the infected individual early enough after onset. Some went years before succumbing to Stage Three. Some… months.

Stage Three consisted of involuntary muscle spasms as the connections between the brain and the body began to get confused, sending shocks through nerve endings to the point the person could no longer control the movements of their bodies. Colloquially Stage Three became known as the “Shanti Shakes”, as the precursor for the disease, they had been told, was the Shanti Virus from the years before the war.

Many who were infected prayed they would die of organ failure before Stage Four set in.

Full body paralysis… but your mind remained intact. Trapped in a body that couldn’t even blink without someone else reaching over and manually opening and closing their eyes. Initially it was believed those who made it to Stage Four were brain dead. Until it happened to a telepath who spent three days mentally screaming before Monty Petrelli, formerly a field medic before he was hit with one of the Cure darts while helping evacuate a testing facility the Undying had raided, put a bullet between the poor bastard’s eyes.

Twenty years after the humans began utilizing their Cure, it was discovered no more evos were being born naturally in populations that had been saturated with the disease. Any that were conceived soon miscarried. Some who managed to hang onto the pregnancy to term found their children stillborn.

But it didn’t matter. Because it was population control. Eradication of the abnormal genetic mutations.

Within thirty years… Evos were born only to Evo parents. If they lived long enough to have kids.

It was the last night.

They knew it.

All the intel in the world didn’t matter when it all said the last fight was tomorrow.

Angela had dreamed it years ago. Had written it down for them even. She hadn’t known how far into the future it was. She didn’t know exactly what would lead to it, but she knew the signs. She told them how it would go, in the end.

If there was one thing they had learned after all this time it was that Angela Petrelli’s dreams always came true. Perhaps not in the way she or anyone else expected them to, but eventually… they would happen.

The only ones left in the Nevada base were volunteers and people who, when a telepath checked their comatose bodies, would rather die in a blaze of glory than continue on as a barely alive vegetable. People with the Shakes who didn’t want to be moved and rather die now than later. Powerless soldiers who could still aim a gun.

And those who simply wanted to watch the world burn.

The last of the Petrellis took a meal together. Trading stories of the past. Of better times. Brighter times. Peter hadn’t argued when Sylar asked Claire if she wanted to see Nathan one more time, even if it was just to scream at him. For a few hours, they could pretend to be a family. Pretend that death didn’t wait for them tomorrow.

After Claire left to take her turn at the night watch, Sylar had returned to himself and asked Peter if there was anything he could do for him. Last request of a dying man and all that.

He had expected Peter to ask him to become someone else. He half expected Peter to ask him to be Emma, just this once. They’d talked about it before, but decided it would be too… odd. Too insulting to her memory. But instead Peter had asked him for shape-shifting, sacrificing the regeneration ability he had so greedily held onto for the last decade. Sylar had of course acquiesced and watched in curiosity as Peter left the room, ordering him to stay put.

When Peter had returned to their quarters roughly half an hour later, he looked young. Eerily so. He hadn’t seen Peter like that in years. Not since they had been with Emma. Not since they had been happy and whole and so filled with hope and-

“You have no idea how hard it was to pull this off,” Peter had said when Sylar had stood from his chair where he’d been left waiting and pulled him into his arms. Peter sighed as Sylar stroked his cheek with the back of his hand in amazement.

“How?”

“I… Practiced before. This ability needs to touch or get a person’s DNA somehow to copy. I just thought… what if I copied myself? And then I nearly died ten years ago and-”

It didn’t matter what he was going to say anyway.

When Sylar finally allowed the poor bastard to breathe again, his eyes weren’t so dead. Not like they had been. “Gabriel,” he said for the first time, at least where Sylar could hear him.

And Gabriel smiled like all his Christmases had come all at once and kissed him again.

They put up one hell of a fight. But it wasn’t enough. They knew it wouldn’t be.

But they wouldn’t go down without one hell of a fight.

“Take flight. You can still get away.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

They fought side by side and back to back. Peter swapping out abilities so quickly it was hard to keep up. Until someone twigged exactly what it was he could do and took out Sylar long enough to incapacitate Peter. Peter who had just grabbed cellular regeneration to heal the machine gun fire that had just torn through his shoulder and into the man behind him.

It wasn’t long after that the remnants of the Evo resistance had been brought down.

Claire was publicly executed, beheading, the people were told, was the only way to deal with an Evo with her power. It was a lie, of course. They could have given her The Cure, like they had the rest of the men and women under her command that they had managed to capture. But she was to be an example. Her death was meant to be a spectacle.

After all, she was the one, their enemy had decried, that had started it all. Claire Petrelli was the face of Evo kind from the beginning. It was only fitting that her death marked the end of the bitter war that had torn the world apart.

Peter was infected after the beatings he was given healed before their eyes.

Sylar, they believed, couldn’t have survived the carpet bombing that followed Claire and Peter’s capture. What was left of the hidden Evo stronghold was a smoking crater.

And so ended the Genetics War.

All that remained was mopping up the rest.

Sylar had survived. He had clawed his way up from the depths and crawled his way out of the crater.

So long as he still lived, he would keep fighting. Keep surviving. It was all he had left.

Peter was given the human’s version of the evo medication to stave off the full effects of the Cure when news broke of a mindless killing machine coming out of Nevada.

Peter, when he learned why they were trying to keep him alive after all had laughed.

He was tortured and interrogated. After all, he was one of the leaders of their enemy. He had to know what it was that had been systematically destroying everything in its path. It had to be an Evo out there.

When Peter finally did give them something, it came on the back end of a torture session that gave him a busted lip and a rather deep - but oddly familiar for Peter - cut across his face. He spat blood at them and simply said, “His name is Sylar.”

He was left alone for a while. How long, Peter hadn’t a clue. He was injected with the medication after he’d stopped taking the pills they gave him. He began to count time in the passage of weeks. Between one stab of the needle and the next. They’d stopped trying to break him when he broke his restraints and tried to bash his own head in rather than crack. They believed him mad by then.

The last visitor he had that wasn’t there to administer his medication had been a woman from the records department of somewhere. Fresh faced and eager. Determined to get an answer from him with honey rather than vinegar. She had been one of the researchers responsible for digging through the archives after it was quickly made apparent that records for Sylar spanned the entirety of the war. He was a constant, just as Claire Petrelli had been. Just as Peter Petrelli had been.

She told him everything they had learned about Sylar from the archives. Everything they assumed based on that information. And Peter had tiredly looked up when she was finished and he shook his head. “You don’t know anything we didn’t want you to know. You don’t even know what his true ability even is.”

“And what is it?”

“Now why would I tell you that? There’s nothing in it for me. My powers are gone. This disease will eventually overcome the medication no matter how strong the doses get. I’ve already shown you can’t get a damn word out of me that I don’t want to give.”

“It could save his life. We’re days away from a cure. A real cure.”

“Why would we want to be cured?”

“Because you’re not normal-”

“I imagine that’s what the monkees thought when the first of us came down out of the trees. I imagine that’s what the Nazi’s said as they herded the Jews into the camps. What the Russians said when they started dragging the gays off to be shot. They weren’t normal. So of course they couldn’t be allowed to live.”

“That’s not-”

“That’s exactly what it is. You people hunt us. You capture us. You kill us. Why? Because we can fly? Because we can heal? Did you know that the blood of someone with cellular regeneration could cure most diseases? HIV. Cancer. Even the Bubonic Plague… all of it could have been eradicated before you were ever born. Imagine doctors with the ability to feel their patients’ pain. Therapists who can get into the mind of a schizophrenic suffering from hallucinations and be able to talk them back down. Help them see reality and bring them back out of a fugue state. Firefighters with so much strength they could pull more than one person at a time to safety while their colleagues literally shoot water from their fingertips to put out the blaze. Detectives that know instantly if a criminal is lying, pretending to be a victim to get out of a prison sentence. We could have done so much good for the world. So much good for mankind had we been given the chance to survive and thrive.” He stared at her, blinking as he watched her process what he had said. The realization in her eyes as his accusations hit her.

“Men and women with the ability to generate electricity could have helped us ditch fossil fuels half a century ago. There was a little girl, back then, who could find anyone in the world just by thinking about them. All she needed was a picture or a name. Can you imagine how many missing persons could have been found? How many kidnapped children could have been saved by someone with her power?”

“Too many to count…” the woman whispered in shame.

“Her name was Molly Walker. Look her up in your records sometime. Look her up see what YOUR kind did to her. Look up Elle Bishop. Matthew Parkman. Mohinder Suresh. Nikki Sanders and Hiro Nakamura.”

He was still shouting names at her when she left him. Shouting the names of the dead and telling her to look them up. To find out what they could do and what they could have done to help the world had they not been killed and tortured and hunted.

When Jennifer Clarke did finally look up some of the names in the old archives, she found what happened to Molly Walker. She found out what had happened to Matthew Parkman and family. She read what files she could find on the Singapore Cure Project and Mohinder Suresh’s unwilling participation. She found where the brain of Hiro Nakamura was stored “for further study”.

And when she came to the last couple of names on the list, her stomach was twisted in knots. The file of Emma Coolidge wasn’t very large in and of itself, and was part of a larger packet of information. Crime scene photos. Autopsy notes. Comments about her ability - related to music and sound manipulation. There was a photograph of her in a wedding dress at what looked to be some kind of governmental building. She was standing between two men, one in a tux Jennifer recognized as their prisoner, Peter Petrelli. The other in a suit… she knew that face. How could she not? She’d been trawling through the records with the others. Researching and digging for anything on Sylar that they could find.

Jennifer consulted Emma’s file again, and the others that it had been collected with. Searching for anything. A scrap of something to connect the monster cutting his way across the country in a violent, bloodthirsty rage, and the woman in the file. The man in the cells.

And then she found it.

Buried in a box in the oldest part of the Pentagon archives.

A name. A name to put with the face that caused so much fear in the hearts of Evos and humans alike.

Jennifer returned to Peter’s cell and asked him, quite simply, “Who was Gabriel Gray?”

Peter didn’t answer. He wouldn’t have even if he could. They had upped his dose and added something new. It made him lethargic, and somewhat incoherent.

But he couldn’t hide the amusement in his eyes.

She would learn, he knew, soon enough.

Four years it took for Sylar to find where they had been holding Peter. He had made quite a name for himself in that time. But not without good reason. He kept the focus on himself, giving those he found along the way time to escape. Time to get to safety.

During those four years he didn’t find many Evos, but he did his best to protect them. To save them. Because that’s what Peter would do. That’s what Peter would have wanted him to do. At least that’s what he wanted to think.

But after four years, he found a clairvoyant. She was holed up with a precog in the ghost town of Odessa, Texas. And once he had his hands on them… well, it was only a matter of time before he was ready to rescue the only person that truly mattered.

The precog’s name was Dan. And he wasn’t exactly a precog… rather, he was more and he was useless at the same time. Dan was an anomaly. His parents were both humans, and both carried the deadly Cure in their blood. And yet… his mother had nearly lost him in utero. But he had survived. When he was born, he was sickly. Barely alive. And yet, like the cockroach, he survived. Blinded, and hard of hearing, but alive.

The clairvoyant, a woman named Anastasia, had found him abandoned as a child. They had kept ahead of the hunters thanks to Dan’s ability to see the web of time. To follow the threads of a life backwards and forwards of anyone he touched. In this way, they always knew when to run and when to hide. Where to hide and what was coming for them.

And that is why they were in Odessa at just the right time on just the right day. To meet just the right man.

Sylar had Dan and Anastasia taken to Alaska where some survivors had dug in deep and hid in the wilderness. He gave Anastasia a name and a photograph of a man and ordered her to find him no matter the cost.

She pinpointed Peter Petrelli in Siberia.

Once he had a location, Sylar was geared up and ready to go on a one man suicide mission.

He was met at the hangar by five armed soldiers. Two men, three women. They refused to let him retrieve Peter alone. Each one owed him their lives in some way. Two of them had been dosed with the Cure and the medication was starting to lose its effectiveness.

“I’d rather die fighting than live with the Shakes, Sir.”

“Do you even know how to fly one of those birds or were you planning to just crash the fucker into the building?”

Six went in after Peter.

Three came out with him.

And Sylar left none alive in their wake.

The butcher that had carved his way across the US for four long years disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared in the days after the war had been officially ended. The monster allowed himself to be put back into the chains of self restraint as he watched the one man who could control him slowly dying.

The medication they had on hand wasn’t strong enough to keep the Shakes at bay. Hell they were amazed he hadn’t succumbed to them yet considering how long ago he had been infected.

“Peter’s always been a stubborn son of a bitch,” Sylar had said. “He’s a Petrelli. It comes standard.”

For all his abilities, all his powers he could do nothing but watch Peter’s health deteriorate. He wasn’t even a shadow of the man he was. Not even an echo.

But he treasured what time they had left together. And when Peter slipped out of Stage Three into Stage Four, he took to staying in Peter’s room at all times. Unwilling to leave him alone for even a moment. He contemplated killing the one telepath they had in the shelter just so he could go into Peter’s mind, like the other had done for him so long ago, and stretch his last days into a blissful eternity of ignorance.

But no, they needed the telepath to deal with those who, like Peter, were ill. Were going to be trapped in their own heads. They needed the telepath if only to tell them when it was time to perform another mercy killing.

The telepath came around every day with the lone medic that cared for the few that remained in the Alaskan shelter. The medic made sure the vitals were still in acceptable levels. Cleared the IVs as needed. Made sure there weren’t any blockages in the feeding tube. That the breathing apparatus was still in working order.

After months like this, the telepath nervously pulled Sylar aside, out of the room, to give him the news that he hoped wouldn’t end up getting himself scalped and his power added to the considerable collection hidden away in the man in front of him.

“He wants you to let him go.”

“I can’t lose him, too. I can’t. I won’t.”

“I’m sorry, Sir, but… Peter he… he wants to die. This isn’t life. This is just… not dying. He is a prisoner in his own body. No one should be made to live like this.”

Sylar looked at the door of Peter’s private room before giving a slow nod. “Come back in with me. I… I have things I need to say to him and I’m sure knowing Peter he’s going to want to have an argument.”

The telepath gave him a soft, sad smile. “That’s true. In the short time I’ve known you both, he is quite mouthy on his good days. You should hear some of the things he’s been screaming at you when he’s angry.”

“I’m pretty sure just by looking at him I know most of what he’s been shouting.”

Sylar had asked Peter for three days. Three days to come to terms with the decision. Three days to make arrangements for when Peter was... Ready to go.

In reality Sylar had wanted those three days to procure a means of killing himself. His options were to hand himself over or to find the most virulent strain of the Cure he could and deliberately infect himself.

When he was younger, death was the most frightening thing to him. Dying alone his greatest fear. Now? Now it was facing eternity without someone, preferably Peter, at his side. Four years without him and he had laid waste to half of what was left of a wartorn United States. What the hell could he accomplish with eternity given over to the darkness and the Hunger and the monster inside?

On the third day he was angry that the one damn time he wanted to deliberately use the most effective weapon their enemy had against them, he couldn’t find a damn dart, vial, or… anything that could to the job really. But what really pissed him off was Dan following him around like a lost damn puppy.

Watching him with his sightless eyes and always around the corner with that damn clicking-clacking of his cane tapping the floor, the walls, anything he came across. Guiding him by sound alone to always find him wherever he went.

At last he couldn’t take it anymore and simply turned around, assuming the little bastard would be there. And he was right. Pinning the annoying, useless precog to the wall, he didn’t know if he was more annoyed by the man’s friendly smile or his inability to flinch when the hungry beast was snarling in his face.

“What the hell do you want!”

“I want to talk to Mr. Peter.”

“He’s not taking visitors. You missed your chance.”

“Then why does your thread end with you, me, Mr. Peter, and Mr. Denton in the infirmary?”

“What?”

“Your life thread, Mr. Gabriel.” And Sylar ground his teeth at the name and the childlike innocence in which it was spoken. “It ends tonight one way or another. But I will be there, and so will Mr. Denton. We have jobs to do but first, I must talk to Mr. Peter before he goes. It’s very important that I do so.”

Sylar had taken a final stroll around the shelter grounds. Not for any truly sentimental reasons… it wasn’t to feel the crunch of ice and snow beneath his boots and pretend it was the winter of 2012 and a few days after Christmas. He wondered what Nathaniel and Virginia’s powers might have been. Would they take after their fathers or their mother? He always pictured Virginia, Ginny as he called her in his head because no daughter of his would go through life with the teasing her full birth name would have lent itself to, with Emma’s long, silky hair and facial structure, but his own coloring. Nathaniel - Nate - of course would have been wiry like Peter and hopefully tall like his mother. Hell, Sylar thought it would have been hilarious if the whole family was taller than Peter. Maybe Nate would have the same lip defect, too. He’d wear it well though. Hardly notice it unless you knew to look for it.

The little shit would be just as stubborn, too. No doubt about that if the hot-tempered Petrelli blood ran true. Nothing Emma’s easy smiles and even temperament couldn’t smooth over.

Sylar sighed and stood in the snow, his head tilted back and letting the cold, frozen water fall onto his face, feeling it melt against his hot skin and wondered for the first time in decades if heaven and hell truly existed. He hoped not. He didn’t think the remnants of his shattered soul could take an eternity separated from the loves of his rather long life. He would rather give himself to utter nonexistence than continue on in the afterlife with the knowledge that he could never be reunited with the family he had somehow found himself a part of.

Though… what he wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall of whatever torture chamber was devised in the depths of hell for Angela Petrelli. Perhaps if he was truly lucky, he might see Arthur and Nathan there, too.

He was still smiling hours later about the thought of watching Nathan Petrelli repeatedly dipped in hot oil until he was nice and crispy. And it was this train of thought that still gripped him when he settled in Peter’s room, taking his hand in his own as he did every day and squeezing tightly to let the man know he was there even if he couldn’t feel it.

“Do you think when I die, I’ll meet Hiro Nakamura in Hell?” he asked Peter as if he might get an answer. “It’s just that… If there is an afterlife we both know I won’t be sent to the same place as you and our wife. I’d imagine stabbing people with samurai swords is something that can get you shoved over the cliff instead of a ride on the elevator.” Sylar put one hand over Peter’s, holding his clammy, still hand between both of his own. “Not you though. You could probably shoot God himself in the face with a fireball and he’d still give you the good halo, wings and all… You’ll give them my love won’t you, Peter? And I’ll tell your brother and mother hello when I land.”

“He says Satan would kick you out after a week if only to get his throne back.”

Sylar’s head snapped up, his dark eyes pinning the telepath in place with his stare alone. And then there was that incessant tapping of a blind man’s stick. “You can stay. Dan, get the fuck out.”

“Sir… I think you should listen to what he has to say. The both of you. The last two hours have been… enlightening. You should see inside his head it’s… it’s unlike anything I have ever seen.”

“You have twenty minutes. And then I’m going to finish saying goodbye to my husband in peace or else I’ll rip your fucking heads off with my bare hands.”

The telepath grimaced at the savage visual his words painted his imagination. After having seen some of the man’s… ‘work’ when he himself was rescued, he had no doubt that this room would be painted with more than just what lay between their ears. It didn’t help that Peter was broadcasting very loudly that Gabriel better not do any such thing… or if he did at least have the courtesy not to do it in his room where he can do fuck all about cleaning up after him.

Dan the blind precognitive found a chair and dragged it to the side of the bed opposite Sylar. He placed his hand over Peter’s making skin to skin contact and then he made himself comfortable.

And for the next twenty minutes exactly he spoke to the man hooked up to the numerous tubes, leads, and machines. In his mind he slid along the thread of Peter’s life. Backwards to his birth and forwards to this moment. And the next. And all the way to the end to the frayed strands where his life would end. He spoke of the great web of time that he could see at all times. Of the little detours life often takes and the false rigidity of time itself.

And after twenty minutes, he stopped and he bid both men a good afternoon. When he let go of Peter’s hand, the telepath reached out to keep the man in his chair. “Peter wants to know why you told him all of this.”

“My power is not to see the future and the past. I am not a precognitive. I am a temporal manipulator. Most do not notice my hand at work, pulling the strings on a life here and there to ensure I am where I need to be at the proper moment. I have only done this in small ways. Stealing a day or two here and there so that none are the wiser.”

“What…” Sylar started to ask, then glanced at Peter briefly. “You steal days? You steal time-”

“That is what I call it. But it’s more… I push someone forward or backward along the thread of their life. They retain their memories until the point in time I have pushed them from.”

The telepath frowned as he looked at Peter, then back at Dan. Then back to Peter. “I’m not sure that’s a very good idea, Sir,” Telepath Denton said with concern in his voice.

Sylar watched Peter’s face, knowing he wouldn't be able to tell anything from it, but he did it regardless. “You do realize it’s probably…” Denton started, but cut himself off with a nod and a sigh.

“What? What is he saying?”

“He wants to know how far back Dan can send someone on their personal timeline, and what the potential ramifications may be.”

“Paradoxes you mean.”

“Essentially yes.”

Dan shrugged. “I don’t know. Once I send someone backwards they are gone from my sight, never to return. I send them forwards, I can still see them in the web on their little string.”

“So you don’t actually know if it works or if you’re killing someone.”

Dan shrugged again. “I suppose, Mr. Gabriel, that is one way to look at it. For the body cannot exist without the mind. The sum of a man is his memories, and his memories are part and parcel to the soul. That’s what I have come to believe.”

Sylar snarled. Denton chuckled under his breath at the response that got from Peter.

“Either way, Mr. Gabriel. It is as I have said. Your thread ends here, today one way or another.”

Denton was quiet as he listened in on the other three men in the room. Peter contemplating his options. He could let himself be taken off life support and have himself put down like a lame animal. Or… take the risk. If he dies, then it doesn’t matter because he’s just as dead now anyway. But what about…

He switched to Sylar, who seemed to have two people in his head arguing over what to do with the situation. On the one hand, going into the past, if it worked, with his memories intact meant the past would be irrevocably changed and the chances of a paradox were incalculable. The other voice, a vastly different one he’d never heard before was telling him the risk was too high. And there was no guarantee he’d even be sane if it worked. After all, didn’t the twerp just say that the memories of a man are part of his soul? Which set of memories would be making the trip? All of them or one of them? Part of one and part of another? Yeah like they needed THAT identity crisis again. Might as well run off to the circus again for all the good it did them. The arguing was giving the telepath a headache until a quiet, third voice spoke up and the other two instantly shut up. It sounded the same as the first one. But it was… different. He couldn’t exactly describe how or why but it seemed… calmer. Whatever it had to say, Denton didn’t catch because he’d moved on to Dan.

Dan’s head, while chaotic as well, was a more… ordered chaos? There was a sense of purpose to his chaos. To the many strings and threads of light that pulsed and shimmered and snapped taut just before they were cut. The gittering branches that seemed to spring to life every microsecond before some falling away and others curling into themselves. Denton found less coherent thought and more a strange storm of abstract concepts.

And then…

A singular sort of thought came at him from three directions.

_ _ _ I’ll risk it. _

_ _ _ Anything to keep Peter close. _

_ Two cut threads and the writhing mass of time’s web collapses in on itself. A new pulsing, throbbing collection of strings and threads coalesces, wilder and faster than before. _

_ Determination. _

_ _ _ _ _ Desperation. _

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ Curiosity. _

_ _ _ H _

_ _ _ _ _ O _

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ P _

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ** _E_ ** _ . _

“Peter?” and Denton hears three voices - three thoughts instead of one from the fractured man holding the wrinkled hand of the dying one tightly, desperately.

Denton nodded. “He wants to try.”

Dan clapped his hands and nodded, rising from his seat and tapping the floor and the bed and the chair with his stick. “Alright then, let’s not waste another moment.”

“What? now?!” Sylar exclaimed as the blind man made his way around the bed.

Dan grinned. He was excited. He’d never attempted what he was about to do. Not… at the level he was going to attempt that is. Like he’d said, he had sent people days ahead or days back. Never pushed the limits of his power like this. To go back years, decades, hell for all he knew it was a century! It was exciting and frightening and he didn’t know if it would work or not - he never would in fact - but oh the web that time would weave after these two were gone from his sight.

Sure, humanity was doomed. The time manipulator knew this for a fact. And these two men’s departure would only hasten the end’s arrival. But at the same time… Humanity had done it to themselves. Once all of the Evos were dead, the Cure would mutate. He could see it so clearly. And then, there was no delaying the inevitable.

But for now, he wanted to see if he could do this. Do this one thing and push the limits of his power to sate his own curiosity.

“Of course now. Your threads are at an end. It’s time to send you… wherever your souls are supposed to go next.” And with that, Dan calmly touched a hand to Peter’s face, feeling around until it settled across his eyes. “Could you give me a hand,” he said to the killer in front of him. “Right over the eyes, if you please. And don’t let go of Mr. Peter’s hand. I’ve never done this for two people before.” And Sylar let go long enough to put Dan’s hand over his eyes. Since he couldn’t see anyway, he closed them, took Peter’s hand in his own again, and took a slow, shuddering breath.

“Now, if this works, do not be alarmed if you see… scars. Strange scars. I have seen, sometimes, when I have sent a person forward to their future selves, that the soul carries scars and they may manifest physically on the body. If this happens, they cannot be healed, even by an ability. So, I apologize in advance if you arrive and find a limb severed or something of the sort.”

And with that, Dan the time manipulator - not precognitive - drew in a deep breath and released, pushing his power into them both rather forcefully.

Denton panicked when both Peter flatlinned and the terrifying force of vengeance and violence that was the legendary bogeyman Sylar slumped forward face first against the dead man on the bed.

“Well, that’s that then,” Dan said as Denton tried, and failed to probe Peter’s mind, then moved to Sylar’s. From the motionless Sylar all he could find was… Well, two screaming voices. Screaming at one another while the quiet presence of the third was entirely absent.

That certainly answered that question.

It was the unfamiliar one that noticed someone listening in.  _ “You can’t leave us like this! The kill spot is in the spleen!” _

_ “You son of a bitch!”  _ the other railed in a rage.  _ “If I hadn’t already slit your fucking throat I’d kill you right now!” _

_ _ _ “Would you mind? Just have someone come by, yank the spleen and put us out of our misery? I don’t think I can take much more of this. Consider it one of your mercy killings.” _

Dan was speaking, but Denton didn’t catch it as he excused himself from the room with the purpose of finding something to ease the headache.

Gabriel Gray woke with a scream, fought with his blankets, and promptly fell out of bed with a solid thud and a flail of limbs.

First there was panic as he scrambled to his feet and staggered around. His head was throbbing and he felt something… damp… from his nose.

There was pain. A lot of pain. A level of pain he hadn’t felt in… ever? Years? No, that wasn’t right…

He staggered from his darkened bedroom, feeling around for something familiar and thankfully discovered the bathroom. A clumsy - since when was he clumsy? What the fuck was going on? - hand fumbled around for a switch on the wall. The halogen light was a welcome flash compared to the harsh light of the ancient fluorescent of the bunkers and the shelter…

What?

He went to the sink, turning on both taps and cupping his hands beneath the faucet before splashing the collected water on his face. Once. Twice. A third time and he was rubbing at his dripping face tiredly before turning off the water and gripping the sides of the bathroom sink.

He was almost afraid to look up. Afraid of what he would see in the mirror and he didn’t understand WHY he didn’t want to look. That is, until he did. He didn’t recognize the face staring back at him at first. The thick brow, the eyes slightly out of focus. He was young. So.... so young looking. Barely out of his teens. He was clean shaven, which was surprising. He preferred a little stubble. His partners did, too.

Wait… no. That wasn’t right. He wasn’t involved with any...body...

And then the pain was back. A sharp, stabbing pain in his chest and his back caused him to double over and nearly crack his head on the edge of the sink. He clutched his chest and didn’t bother holding back the scream as he felt a slickness beneath his fingers. But when he was able to grab a hand towel from the neat stack on the back of the toilet and wipe at the blossoming red mess there was… nothing. Nothing but a raised scar. Old and healed over and-

His shoulder felt like it was on fire and Gabriel screamed again as he fell to his knees on the tile floor. This time, he really did slam his head into something - the toilet. As he began to lose consciousness, alone in the familiar yet unfamiliar bathroom of an apartment in Queens, an equally familiar yet unfamiliar thought crossed the mind of Gabriel Gray that otherwise unremarkable summer night in 1996.

_ Wasn’t he holding Peter’s hand a moment ago? _

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone interested a woman being pregnant from 2 men at the same time is called [superfecundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfecundation) and is a very real thing.


End file.
